Enter a dolphin's fluid, hyper-social consciousness

I’VE spent years thinking about consciousness and my current obsession is whether we can know anything about what it is like is to be a dog, a dolphin, or a bat. The most influential answer came from philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” Unlike some of the era’s behaviourists, who saw animals as little more than automatons that respond to stimulus, Nagel didn’t doubt bats had experience, that it was “like something” being a nimble, echo-locating mammal swooping through the night. But he doubted our ability to say anything true about it beyond …